The marketplace has witnessed technological advances enabling not only voice communication, but also messaging, multimedia playback, personal organizers, electronic mail, built-in cameras/camcorders, games, and Internet browsing, as well as access to a host of other applications and services. As such, mobile devices, such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) with telephony capability, laptop/notebook computers, pocket personal computers, etc., pervade throughout modern society for both business and personal use. Accompanying this increased level of lifestyle penetration has been the development of a mobile culture seeking to define its personality through its communication devices. With the ability to decorate, accessorize, or otherwise customize their mobile terminals, users have transformed their communication devices into extensions of their personalities, reflecting their likes and dislikes. Apart from the ability to visually modify the external appearance, users can configure various features within these devices, including, for example, adjusting ringing tone, melody, volume, mode (vibrate, silent, single beep, etc.), providing ring back tones, ensuring call screening/filtering, regulating notification and/or alert methods, as well as controlling other variable features and settings.
Consequently, distinctive ringtones (the sound made by a mobile device to indicate an incoming communication session or other notifications) have become popular with consumer and business customers alike. It is commonplace for a user to select ringtones in form of music or other sound effects. Given the variety of ringtones available, it is noted that certain ringtones may not be appropriate in certain environments. For example, a musical ringtone that has objectionable lyrics may be interesting in a personal setting among friends, but may be viewed as unprofessional in a business setting.
Conventionally, users have to manually alter the ringtone settings among these different environments. However, this process is highly inconvenient and impractical for users, and thus, discourages such users from modifying the ringtone settings. Also, because no convenient approach exists for manipulating multiple ringtones, users who would otherwise want to download a certain ringtone are deterred from doing so because they recognize it would have limited use.
Service providers of ringtones could increase their revenue by making the process more appealing to these types of users, as well as increasing their competitiveness among current adopters of ringtone service.
Therefore, there is a need for conveniently managing multiple ringtones of a mobile device.